by Jandy Nelson
He walks over to a short blond-haired girl. “May I, Melinda?”
“Please,” she says. I can see how much she’s blushing even from up here. She’s totally in love with him. I look at the faces of the others who have gathered around them and realize they all are, male and female both.
(PORTRAIT, LANDSCAPE: A Man on a Geographic Scale)
He takes a long drag on the cigarette, then tosses it barely smoked onto the ground and steps on it. He smiles at Melinda. “We find your woman, yes?”
He studies the clay model beside the large rock, then closes his eyes and combs the surface with his fingers. He does the same with the hunk of stone next to it, examining it with his hands while his eyes are closed. “Okay,” he says, taking a power drill off the table. I can feel the excitement of the students, as he, without any hesitation, plows straight into the rock. Before long, a dust cloud forms and I can’t see any more. I need to get closer. I mean really close. I think I need to live on this man’s shoulder like a parrot.
When the noise stops and the dust clears, all the students start clapping. There in the rock is the curved back of a woman identical to the one on the clay model. It’s unbelievable.
“Please,” he says. “Back to your own work.” He hands Melinda the drill. “You will find the rest of her now.”
He goes from student to student, sometimes not saying a thing, sometimes exploding into praise. “Yes!” he cries to one of them. “You did it. Look at that breast. The most beautiful breast I ever see!” The kid cracks up and the artist cuffs him on the head like a proud father might. It makes something pull in my chest.
To another student, he says, “Very good. Now it’s time to forget everything I just say. Now you go slow. So, so slow. You caress the stone. You make love to it but gently, gently, gently, understand? Use the chisels, nothing else. One wrong move and you ruin everything. No pressure.” Same head cuff for him.
When he seems to determine that no one needs him, he goes back inside. I follow him, walking to the other side of the landing where the windows are, standing to the side so I can see in without being seen. Inside, there are more rock giants. And on the far side of the studio, three naked women, with thin red scarves veiling their bodies, are modeling on a platform surrounded by a group of students sketching.
No naked English guy.
I watch the artist as he goes from student to student, standing behind each one and peering down at their work with a cold hard stare. I tense up as if he’s looking at my sketches. He’s not pleased. All at once, he claps his hands and everyone stops drawing. Through the window I hear muffled words as he becomes increasingly animated and his hands begin to glide around like Malaysian flying frogs. I want to know what he’s telling them. I need to know.
Finally, they resume drawing. He grabs a pencil and pad off a table and joins them, saying the following so loudly and with so much rocket fuel in his voice I hear it through the window, “Sketch like it matters, people. No time to waste, nothing to lose. We are remaking the world, nothing less, understand?”
Just like Mom says. And yes, I do understand. My heart is speeding. I totally understand.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Remakes World Before World Remakes Boy)
He sits down and begins sketching with the group. I’ve never seen anything like the way his hand races back and forth across the pad, the way his eyes seem to suck in every morsel of the models posing before him. My stomach’s in my throat as I try to figure out what he’s doing, as I study the way he holds the pencil, the way he is the pencil. I don’t even need to see his sketchpad to know the genius that’s on it.
Until this moment, I didn’t realize how badly I sucked. How far I have to go. I really might not get in to CSA. The Ouija Board was right.
I stumble down the fire escape, lightheaded, unsteady. In one split second I saw everything I could be, everything I want to be. And all that I’m not.
The sidewalk has risen up and I’m sliding down it. I’m not even fourteen, I tell myself. I have years and years to get good. But I bet Picasso was already hella good at my age. What have I been thinking? I totally freaking blow. I’m never going to get in to CSA. I’m so stuck in this toilet-licking conversation in my head, I almost fly past the red car parked out front that looks just like Mom’s car. But it couldn’t be. What in the world would she be doing all the way over here? I glance at the plates—it is Mom’s car. I swivel around. Not only is it Mom’s car, but Mom’s in it, bent over the passenger seat. What’s she doing?
I knock on the window.
She springs up, but doesn’t seem as surprised to see me as I am to see her. She doesn’t seem surprised at all, in fact.
She rolls down the window, says, “You scared me, honey.”
“What were you doing bent over like that?” I ask instead of the more obvious question: What are you doing here?
“I dropped something.” She looks strange. Her eyes are too bright. There’s sweat on her lip. And she’s dressed like a fortune-teller, with a glittery purple scarf around her neck and a yellow river of a dress with a red sash. On her wrists are color bangles. Except the times when she wears one of Grandma’s Floating Dresses, she usually dresses like a black-and-white movie, not a circus.
“What?” I ask.
“What what?” she asks back, confused.
“What did you drop?”
“Oh, my earring.”
Both her ears have earrings in them. She sees me see this. “Another earring, I wanted to change pairs.”
I nod, pretty sure she’s lying to me, pretty sure she saw me and was hiding from me and that’s why she didn’t seem surprised to see me. But why would she hide from me?
“Why?” I ask.
“Why what?”
“Why did you want to change pairs?”
We need a translator. I’ve never needed a translator with Mom before.
She sighs. “I don’t know, I just did. Get in, honey.” She says this like we had a plan all along for her to pick me up here. This is so weird.
On the way home, the car is a box of tension and I don’t know why. It takes me two blocks to ask her what she was doing in that part of town. She tells me there’s a very good dry cleaner on Day Street. And there are about five closer to our house, I don’t say. But she hears anyway because she explains further, “It was one of the dresses Grandma made for me. My favorite. I wanted to make sure it was in very good hands, the best hands, and this cleaner is the best.” I look for the pink receipt, which she usually clips to the dash. Not there. But maybe it’s in her purse? I guess this could be true.
It takes another two blocks for her to say what she should’ve said immediately. “You’re a long way from home.”
I tell her I went for a walk and ended up there, not wanting to tell her I hopped a fence, climbed a fire escape, and stalked some genius, who made it very clear she’s wrong about me and my talent.
She’s about to question me further, I can tell, but then her phone vibrates on her lap. She looks at the number and presses the button to ignore it. “Work,” she says, glancing my way. I’ve never known her to perspire like this. There are darkened circles in the yellow fabric under her arms like she’s a construction worker.
She squeezes my knee with her hand when we pass the CSA studio buildings, now so familiar to me. “Soon,” she says.
Then it all becomes clear. She followed me. She’s worried about me because I’ve been such a hermit crab. There’s no other explanation that makes sense. And she hid and lied to me about the dry cleaner because she didn’t want me to freak out about her spying on me and invading my privacy. I relax into this explanation.
Until she takes the second instead of the third left up the hill, and near the top, pulls into a driveway. I stare in disbelief as she gets out, saying, “Well, aren’t you coming in?” She’s almost to the door, keys in hand,
when she realizes she’s on her way into some other house, where some other family lives.
(PORTRAIT: Mom Sleepwalking into Another Life)
“Where’s my head?” she says, when she gets back in the car. This could be funny, it should be, but it’s not. Something’s not right. I can feel it in every bone, but I don’t know what it is. She doesn’t start up the engine either. We stay in this other family’s driveway in silence, staring out at the ocean, where the sun has made its gleaming road to the horizon. It looks like there are stars on the water and I want to take a walk on it. It totally sucks that only Jesus gets to walk on water. I’m about to say this to Mom when I realize the car has filled up with the thickest, heaviest kind of sadness and it’s not mine. I had no idea she was so sad. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t noticed Jude and I have gotten a divorce.
“Mom?” I say, my throat suddenly so dry it comes out like a croak.
“Everything’s going to work out,” she says quickly, quietly, and starts the engine. “Don’t worry, honey.”
I think about all the horrible things that happened the last time someone told me not to worry, but nod, just the same.
• • •
The end of the world begins with rain.
September washes away, then October. By November, even Dad can’t stay on top of it, which means it’s pretty much raining inside as well as outside the house. There are pans and pots and buckets everywhere. “Who knew we needed a new roof?” Dad mumbles to himself again and again like a mantra.
(PORTRAIT: Dad Balancing the House on His Head)
This, after a lifetime of replacing batteries before flashlights conk out, lightbulbs before they go dark: Can’t be too prepared, son.
However, after much observation, I’ve concluded that it’s not raining on Mom. I find her on the deck smoking (she’s not a smoker) as if under an invisible umbrella, always with the phone to her ear, not saying anything, just swaying and smiling like someone’s playing her music on the other end. I find her humming (she’s not a hummer) and jingling (she’s not a jingler) through the house, down the street, up the bluff in her new circus clothes and bangles, her own private sunbeam enclosing her while the rest of us grip the walls and furniture so we don’t wash away.
I find her at her computer where’s she’s supposed to be writing a book but instead is staring up at the ceiling like it’s full of stars.
I find her and find her and find her but I can’t find her.
I have to say her name three times before she hears it. I have to bang on the wall with my fist when I walk into her office or kick a chair across the kitchen before she even notices someone’s joined her in the room.
It occurs to me with rising concern that a blow-in can also blow away.
The only way I can snap her out of it is to talk about my CSA portfolio, but because she and I have already chosen the five drawings I’m painting in oils with Mr. Grady, there’s not much to discuss until the great unveiling and I’m not ready. I don’t want her to see them until they’re done. They’re close. I’ve worked on them every single day at lunch and after school all fall long. There’s no interview or anything, getting in is based pretty much only on your artwork. But after seeing that sculptor sketch, my eyes got swapped again. Sometimes now, I swear I can see sound, the dark green howling wind, the crimson crush of rain—all these sound-colors swirling around my room while I lie on my bed thinking about Brian. His name, when I say it aloud: azul.
In other news, I’ve grown over three inches since the summer. If anyone still messed with me, I could kick them off the planet. No problem. And my voice has dropped so low most humans can’t register it. I hardly use it, except occasionally with Heather. She and me, we’re sort of getting along again now that she likes some other boy. A couple times, I even went running with her and her runner friends. It was okay. No one cares if you don’t talk much when you’re running.
I’ve turned into a very quiet King Kong.
Today, a very worried, very quiet King Kong. I’m trudging up the hill from school in torrential rain with one thing on my mind: What am I going to do when Brian comes back for Christmas break and he’s with Jude?
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Drinking the Dark out of My Own Cupped Hands)
When I get home, I see no one’s here, as usual. Jude’s hardly ever home for very long these days—she’s taken to surfing in the rain after school with the diehard surftards—and when she is home she’s on the computer chatting with Brian aka Spaceboy. I saw a couple more of their exchanges. In one he talked about the movie—the one we were watching when he grabbed my hand under the armrest! I almost threw up on the spot.
Sometimes at night, I sit on the other side of the wall wanting to pull off my ears so I don’t hear the ding of yet another message from him over the hum of her stupid sewing machine.
(PORTRAIT: Sister in the Guillotine)
I drip through the house, a raincloud, dutifully kicking over a bucket by Jude’s bedroom so the dirty water soaks into her fluffy white carpet and hopefully mildews it, then enter my room, where I’m surprised to find Dad sitting on my bed.
I don’t cringe or anything. For some reason, he doesn’t bug me so much lately. It’s like he drank a potion, or maybe I did. Or maybe it’s because I’m taller. Or maybe it’s because we’re both all messed up. I don’t think he can find Mom either.
“Storm catch you?” he asks. “I’ve never seen anything like this rain. Time for you to build that ark, eh?”
This is a popular joke at school too. I don’t mind. I love Bible Noah. He was nearly 950 years old when he died. He got to leave with the animals. He started the whole world over: blank canvas and endless tubes of paint. Freaking the coolest.
“Totally got me,” I say, grabbing a towel off my desk chair. I start drying my head, waiting for the inevitable comment about the length of my hair, but it doesn’t come.
What comes is this: “You’re going to be bigger than me.”
“You think?” The idea’s an instant mood-lifter. I’m going to take up more space in a room than my father.
(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Hops from Continent to Continent with Dad on Shoulders)
He nods, raises both eyebrows. “At the rate you’re going lately, sure seems like it.” He surveys the room as if taking inventory, museum print to print—they pretty much cover every inch of wall and ceiling—then he looks back at me and slaps his hands on his thighs. “So, I thought we could get some dinner. Have some father-son time.”
He must register the horror on my face. “No”—he makes fingers quotes—“talks. Promise. Just some grub. I need some mano a mano.”
“With me?” I ask.
“Who else?” He smiles and there’s absolutely no asshat anywhere in his face. “You’re my son.”
He gets up and walks to the door. I’m reeling from the way he said: You’re my son. It makes me feel like his son.
“I’m going to wear a jacket,” he says, meaning a suit jacket, I guess. “Want to?”
“If you want me to,” I say, bewildered.
Who knew the first date of my life would be with my father?
Only I realize as I put on my one jacket—I last wore it at Grandma Sweetwine’s funeral—that the sleeves come closer to my elbows than my wrists. Holy Jesus, I really am King Kong! I walk to Mom and Dad’s bedroom with the evidence of my gigantism still on my back.
“Ah,” Dad says, grinning. He opens his closet and pulls out a dark blue blazer. “This should do it, just a little snug on me.” He taps his non-existent belly.
I take off my jacket and slip his on. It fits perfectly. I can’t stop smiling.
“Told you,” he says. “Wouldn’t even think of wrestling you now, tough guy.”
Tough guy.
On my way out the door, I ask, “Where’s Mom?”
“Got me.”
&
nbsp; Dad and I go to a restaurant on the water and sit by the window. The rain makes rivulets, distorting the view. My fingers twitch to draw it. We eat steaks. He orders a scotch, then another, and lets me have sips. We both get dessert. He doesn’t talk about sports or bad movies or loading the dishwasher properly or weird jazz. He talks about me. The whole time. He tells me that Mom showed him some of my sketchpads, he hoped that was all right, and he was blown away. He tells me he’s so excited I’m applying to CSA and that they’d be idiots not to take me. He said he can’t believe his one and only son is so talented and that he can’t wait to see my final portfolio. He said he’s so proud of me.
I’m not lying about any of this.
“Your mother thinks you’re both shoo-ins.”
I nod, wondering if I heard wrong. Last I knew, Jude wasn’t applying. I must’ve heard wrong. What would she even submit?
“You’re really lucky,” he says. “Your mom has so much passion for art. It’s contagious, isn’t it?” He smiles, but I can see his inside face and it isn’t smiling at all. “Ready to switch?”
I reluctantly lift my chocolate decadence to trade for his tiramisu.
“Nah, forget it,” he says. “Let’s get two more. How often do we do this?”
Over our second dessert, I gear up to say that the parasites and bacteria and viruses he studies are as cool as the art Mom studies, but then decide it’ll sound lame and phony, so I motor through the cake instead. I start to imagine people around us thinking to themselves, “Look at that father and son having dinner together, isn’t that nice?” It blows me up with pride. Dad and me. Buddies now. Chums. Bros. Oh, I’m feeling supernaturally good for once—it’s been so long—so good I start blabbing like I haven’t since Brian left. I tell Dad about these basilisk lizards I just found out about that can move so fast across the surface of water, they can go sixty-five feet without sinking. So Jesus isn’t the only one after all.
